Board Contends Gore's Role Politicized NAEP Release

The nonpartisan board that governs the "nation's report card" is
complaining that Vice President Al Gore jeopardized the integrity of
the tests when he announced 1998 reading results to a campaign-style
rally last month.

"The format, tone, and substance of that event [where Mr. Gore was
the lead speaker] was not consistent with the principle of an
independent, nonpartisan release of ... data," Mark D. Musick, the
chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, wrote last month
in a letter to Pascal D. Forgione Jr., the federal commissioner of
education statistics for the Department of Education.

At the Feb. 10 event unveiling the national results of the 1998
National Assessment of Educational Progress reading exam, the vice
president was the featured speaker in a room in which education
lobbyists and political appointees at the Education Department received
the best seats. Mr. Gore, who is considered the favorite for the
Democratic presidential nomination next year, was greeted with and
departed to standing ovations.

A policy set by the NAEP governing board calls for Mr. Forgione to
officially announce the tests' results. Only then are political
appointees supposed to comment on them. To comply with those rules, Mr.
Forgione released the 1998 reading results on the World Wide Web an
hour before Mr. Gore spoke. ("Federal
File," Feb. 24, 1999.)

Seeking More Coverage

The New York Times wrote, as Mr. Musick noted in his Feb. 18
letter, that the Feb. 10 event was "more political than usual" for NAEP
releases.

Department officials structured the event the way they did, Mr.
Forgione said in an interview last week, because they thought it would
draw more media coverage than the standard forum in which he presents
data before others comment on it.

The event's atmosphere undermined the credibility of the results,
Mr. Musick suggested in his letter. Unless the board's policy of
neutral presentations is followed, "it eventually won't matter how much
attention is paid to the results; people won't believe them," he
wrote.

In the interview, Mr. Forgione appeared to agree. He added that the
Feb. 10 incident was "anomalous" and would damage NAEP's reputation if
it happened that way regularly.

Last week, Mr. Gore did not attend the news conference called to
announce state-by-state results of the 1998 reading exam.

But the third paragraph in the Education Department press release
distributed at the event included the following quote from the vice
president: "While today's news is a measure of the progress we have
made together, it is also a yardstick showing how far we still need to
go. Too much depends on how well our children read for us to allow a
single child not to read well."

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